Update: Ubisoft have subsequently restored access to these games. So they got a PR black eye, and not much else out of this. In more positive news, they have published a fairly comprehensive list of authorised retailers.

It would appear that users of the Ubisoft official forums have found certain games revoked from their uPlay accounts, without warning or explanation, resulting in them no longer being able to play them. The best theory suggests that these keys were purchased from unauthorised retailers, since this is something all users claim to have in common, but without any statement from Ubisoft to confirm or deny this, this is only speculation. I’ve ascended the control tower to try to get some perspective on what’s going on, and see if I can get a reading of the lay of the land.

You may remember that a few weeks back I wrote a largely speculative article about what to expect from some upcoming changes to Steam. It seems that I was pretty much spot on about what to expect from “Steam Curators”, although I was wrong on one crucial detail: Valve aren’t offering curators any commission in return for their work.

Bit of a shame for me, since I was quite keen on the idea of getting affiliate commission from Steam like I do most other major digital distribution outlets, but perhaps Valve realised that many people would be happy to curate their storefront for free. Or maybe some kind of commission structure is still in the pipeline.

What does this mean for you? Well that depends. Essentially Valve have replaced the old Steam front page with a new one. The new one will be tailored to you specifically, rather than being one front page for all customers. The new storefront picks which games to display based on games you have already bought and played, and recommendations pulled in from “Curators”, Steam users that collate lists of recommended games.

To improve the recommendations you receive, you can opt to follow a curator, and then the recommendation engine will pull titles from their recommended lists.

There’s a couple of issues I have with this system. There’s seemingly no mechanism in place whatsoever to prevent under the table payola arrangements between publishers and curators. I suppose this has been the case prior to Steam Curators, but there’s pretty big scope for abuse here. I also worry whether this system will be good for getting unappreciated games exposure, or will it just end up favouring games from established developers with a marketing budget?

Overall though, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Like many Steam features, it’s launched in an imperfect state, but I’m sure it will improve over time.

If you’d like to receive recommendations from SavyGamer on your Steam front page you can follow us here.

I’m planning to meticulously curate the store, I’ve already completed my first pass of going through the entire Steam catalogue and picking out my favourites, but I’ve probably missed out some obvious games. I’ll be sure to keep it updated as interesting new releases get added to Steam.

Steam’s Greenlight submission process has always been an imperfect solution to a hard problem: How can Valve present users with a reasonably curated storefront, resulting in a good experience, but still avoid placing unnecessary barriers to market for creators hoping to sell their games on Steam. It’s somewhat achieved that goal, but there’s huge scope for improvement.

So then, as you may have seen, I recently featured a bunch of deals on SavyGamer involving procuring a stack of discounted gift vouchers from website mightydeals.co.uk.

These deals relied on exploiting a loophole which I fully tested myself prior to posting, and had been able to confirm as working.

Sadly, subsequent to my posting it, mightydeals appear to have closed the loophole, leaving a bunch of people in a somewhat inconvenient limbo.

It seems that they have been cancelling some of the gift voucher purchases deemed to have been made by the same person. I’ve not received an email yet, but some people have received an email detailing the following:

Thank you for your recent purchase of the Curry’s High Street e-Giftcard.

So everyone can enjoy this fantastic deal we have limited the purchase to one per customer as per the deal terms we will be cancelling any duplicated purchases. It is one per customer, not one per email / Mighty Deals account created.

Only one ‘50% Off the high street gift voucher’ purchase is allowed per individual.

Any person buying multiple ‘50% off the high street gift voucher’ will have the transaction cancelled without further notice and the money refunded.

To see more please review the deal terms.

Mighty Deals and our partners will not be honoring your duplicated vouchers purchased. Your refund has been sent back to the original card you used to pay with and should be with you in the next 7 working days.

I knew that the worst case scenario according to the Mighty Deals terms and conditions would be that you’d be able to get a full refund, as such I figured that the potential savings more than offset the convoluted nature of the loophole.

I’ve looked into it a bit, and if you are affected by this, here’s my advice:

If you have no urgent need to get your refund processed quickly, my best advice is to sit tight and just wait to see how it plays out. It’s possible that some but not all of your gift voucher purchases will be fulfilled, and these might still be of use to you, even if it’s not enough to buy what you had planned to spend them on.

If you would like to get your refund as quickly as possible, I suggest contacting mighty deals directly here, and raise a dispute with paypal (or your bank, whichever you used to pay with).

If anyone has any more trouble, or anything else that they’d like me to try and clear up, please post in the comments here.

I’m always on the look out for a good loophole or trick to push things in SavyGamer users favour, but I never knowingly risk people wasting their money, and I always scrutinise a deal for the possibility of people losing out before posting it. I perhaps lean a bit more towards reckless rather than overcautious, since that’s where most of the best deals are to be found, but I hope no one feels too let down by this not panning out as we’d all hoped.

The latest in a rather long chain of 180 degree turns from Microsoft regarding policies and business decisions relating to the Xbox One came into effect last month. With Microsoft deciding that actually no, Kinect is not “an essential and integrated part of the platform” as originally stated, they made the console available to buy without their costly and unwanted camera, and in the process hit price parity with their closest competitor, Sony’s PS4.

Update: My new laptop has been ordered, and is on the way. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed. I’m blown away by your generosity, helping me out in my hour of need. The donations I received amounted to 40% of the cost of the new one, and I can cover the rest myself. I’ll unsticky this post now, although if anyone is just seeing it for the first time, you can still contribute if you like. I’ll be sure to update this post if the total donated reaches 100% of the cost of the new laptop down the line. Thanks so much, I promise to continue to do everything I can to keep you informed about all the best gaming deals. <3

Not too long ago through my own clumsiness I managed to break my laptop. Sadly it wasn't covered by the warranty or by my house insurance.

A laptop is a tool I need to run SavyGamer effectively, and without one I'm tied to only being able to post stuff when at my desktop.

As such, I've just incurred the unexpected expense of buying a replacement. Luckily I have enough savings that this isn't going to negatively impact me too much, but I had earmarked that money for more important and more fun things.

I figured that there might be a few SavyGamer users who, upon hearing about this situation, would want to contribute some money towards the replacement, hence this post.

If you'd like to send a little bit of money my way, you can do so via this paypal button:

Please only contribute if you have plenty of disposable income. As I said, I’m asking for donations to make my life easier, not because I can’t get by otherwise.

If you’d like to help out, but are unable to contribute financially, I always appreciate it whenever you lot help spread the word, and recommend SavyGamer to anyone else who might find it a useful service.

Hello everyone! You might have noticed a drop in deals over the last few days. Sorry about that.

Lewie is off gallivanting around the world right now, with a trusty laptop for company to make sure he can keep all his plates spinning while he’s doing so. Unfortunately, said laptop has turned out not to be so trusty and is currently in need of repair. While he’s done a great job of keeping the deals coming on his break until now, as you might imagine, this is a bit of a roadblock.

Lewie will be back in the UK next month, at which point normal service should begin to pick up due to having access to computers and such. In the mean time, the B Team will be filling in the gaps as best as we can. We might not be able to grab you a deal quite as quick as Lew but what we lack in alacrity we make up for in spirit of heart, or something.

If you want a deal for something specific, please ask us on Twitter and we’ll do our best – I’m @Willeth and Tony is @standardman. You can follow Lewie on Twitter at @LewieP for updates on his status too.

The thing that twitter users got angry about last night is a thing that anyone who has engaged with games media from any angle, whether it’s consuming it or producing it, is all too familiar with. Maia dev and opinionated rascal Simon Roth vented about a youtube channel asking for a cut of sales of his game in exchange for producing a video of his game. This echoes much of the worst conspiracy theories about paid off reviews and games journalists just being PRs in cheaper suits, but is this inherently problematic? I’m going to throw my hat into the ring on the side of “No it is not inherently problematic”, but there’s a big stack of caveats, and equal parts apprehension and confusion for what the future of the video games industry looks like. But I think we’re all going to have to get used to it.

After publishing this article on Square-Enix’s crowd-funding programme, Phil Elliott, who is heading up the programme reached out to me to see if we could discuss it further. I had a few key questions to put to him, which he has kindly replied to.

In October last year, Square-Enix was the first of the old giants of video game publishing to dip their toe into the murky waters of crowd-funding. Their programme titled “The Collective” is, in their words, intended to give consumers a chance “to shape games development and champion ideas that you’d like to become reality”. Developers can participate in the programme either with an original IP which they retain ownership of, or with a pitch for a game using an existing S-E IP. Full details of the programme can be read here, but it seems to me that there’s some pretty significant scope for things to go wrong.

Recently there has been much discussion of the business model of serial key resellers, and I figured it might be best for me to chime in with my position on this process. How these business operate is that they acquire serial keys for games from somewhere, and then sell those serial keys without explicit permission to do so from the developer/publisher. It is my strongly held belief that this serves to benefit consumers, and it is a pretty fundamental aspect of how markets function. I’ve linked to serial resellers regularly on SavyGamer in the past, I do so whenever I see a serial reseller offering a game at a price that constitutes a good deal, and I fully plan to continue to do so.

The information presented on a store listing for any item available to buy is critical to purchasers. People base their purchasing decisions on a range of information, and “The things that the shop I am buying them from tell me” is a key source that informs purchasing decisions. It seems that Valve are aware of this, and as such have taken steps to present games for sale in the best light possible, in a way that I would argue is concealing important information from their users.

Do you remember when games were just games? It seems so long ago now. These days games are constantly updated services, with chunks of the components making up the constituent parts of the “game” split between local devices and storage media, and rows and rows of servers off in a warehouse somewhere. This somewhat undermines the concept of a traditional video game review, where there is no single complete thing that can be reviewed, and distilling an ongoing service into a buyer’s guide or critique isn’t really possible when it represents a moving target. But this does not absolve reviewers of responsibility to provide accurate information on how they can expect services to work. Enter Garden Warfare, EA’s attempt at turning Plants vs Zombies into a third person shooter of all things. EA haven’t clearly outlined their plans for the business model of Garden Warfare. Whilst they’ve confirmed that they want people to fork over £24.99 to £34.99 for the game, they are being cagey about the future implementation of any microtransactions. Not that you’d be aware of this if you read most reviews.

Two business models which have been increasing in popularity in recent times have now collided together on Steam, and in my mind there is a problematic aspect of how they’ve been implemented. Free To Play and Early Access have the potential to radically alter how games and made, sold and played, but currently there is a lack of transparency in how Valve have implemented them, that is potentially misleading customers, and the onus is on Valve to fix this.

Update: Common sense has prevailed, and Double Fine have decided to drop the embargo. Full email update at the bottom of the article.

Double Fine’s Kickstarter rippled throughout the industry when in February 2012 they managed to raise a big boatload of money in order to develop a traditional 2D point & click adventure (At the time only known as “Double Fine Adventure”), and to finance a documentary of the development process. They asked for $400,000, but ended up receiving more than eight times that.

As a quick update to this report on the region availability of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance on Steam, it seems Konami have now made it so that Irish gamers will be able to buy the PC version of Revengeance.

Previously, when attempting to buy Revengeance from Steam, if you were accessing Steam from an Irish ip address, you would have been greeted with this message:

This decision does not extend to other regions, with Japan and many other Asian countries still unable to buy it from Steam. Also of note, the region locking of serials from other distributors is still in place, and as is the cross-region gifting block, but this is great news for customers residing in The Republic.

In recent years, a number of the old giants of Japanese Video Game publishing have been increasingly turning their attention to the PC gaming. It seems to me that this is part of a general trend of seeking to become less insular, diversifying their output to be less dependent on the handful of console platforms available to them, and a recognition that there is a strong business case for catering to PC gamers. Whether it’s Sega’s transition to a PC publishing powerhouse, Namco Bandai’s eventual capitulation to the hoards of petitioners and bringing Dark Souls to PC (making a boatload of money in the process), or Capcom’s shift towards cross platform development with their in house tech and their outsourced projects, it’s clear that there’s gold in them thar hills.

In the interest of looking after my mental well being, and just to recharge a bit, I’ve decided to go for a short holiday, and spend next week chilling the fuck out on a beach somewhere warm.

I’ve not actually taken any proper time off from running SavyGamer for over six years, and I think I probably need it now more than ever.

I’ll be back at the helm at some point when I return next weekend, but until then, my henchman Tony has said that he’ll do what he can to keep things ticking over. He has a proper job though, so anything he does get posted he’ll be fitting in around that. Huge thanks to him for stepping up at such short notice.

In the meantime, take care, and don’t do anything drastic like buying a game for full price.

Sadly, earlier this week the editors of Rock Paper Shotgun informed me that they no longer require me to write my weekly discount column, or any other freelance work. I have written the Bargain Bucket for RPS almost every single weekend since March 2009, and sporadic other freelance pieces at various times, but not any more.

As for what happened, the RPS editors and I had a disagreement over a policy decision. I feel that I was acting in the best interests of the readers, but it could be that there’s aspects of the disagreement that I don’t fully understand. I believe that the proposed changes would have impacted my ability to do the job properly, so I couldn’t agree to them. Given that, they have decided that they no longer want me writing for their site in any capacity.

I’ll certainly miss it. I took a great deal of pride in my work for RPS, and I put a lot into those columns. It’s a shame that it had to end like this, but I’ll never forget how much I owe RPS for taking a chance on me all those years ago. Writing for RPS has had an incalculable impact on my personal and professional life. Thank you to all the former and current RPS editors and writers for everything you did for me, I wish you all the best in future.

I would also like to say a huge thank you to all of the readers of RPS. You’re the most enjoyable audience that I have had the pleasure of writing for. You’ve always been polite, friendly, and fair to me. It’s been a real privilege to serve you.

Finally, I’d like to thank the developers of any games that I ever featured in the Bargain Bucket. You all gave me something to actually write about.

I’m not sure exactly what my future plans are. I currently have no ongoing obligations except for running SavyGamer, which I am absolutely committed to. I’m not too worried about money, although things might be a little tight now. I have a few ideas for other projects that I might engage in, and if anybody reading this would like to employ me to do something interesting in the games industry, please get in touch. If it’s something genuinely interesting, my rates will probably be pretty reasonable.

Greetings SavyGamers. I think I’m overdue some time off, what do you reckon?

I’m going to Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts. I’ll be away from the 21st of June until the 1st of July, and I’ll probably need a day or two to properly recover after that. There won’t be many updates on SavyGamer during this period, although Will and Tony have very graciously said that they will try to fill in for me when they have spare time.

Otherwise, consider this a good time to play all of the games that you’ve already bought for not very much money, and normal service will resume shortly.

I hate browsing the internet with adverts, that’s why I use an adblocker. I don’t think I am under any obligation to allow websites to display adverts on my computer.

I dislike it when websites make needy pleas to their users to disable adblockers. “Because that’s how we make our money”, as if the users of adblockers weren’t aware of the revenue stream they are opting to bypass. If you run a business, the onus is on you to find a model that works, not the customers.

I also dislike it that there are adverts everywhere. I live in London, and my eyeballs are bombarded with corporate propaganda whenever I leave the house. If I could wear a pair of magic glasses that blocked these adverts, or if I could make them disappear with the point of a finger, I would.

In my capacity as a freelance writer for other websites, I do accept money that has come from advertisers, so perhaps I am sometimes part of the problem. I did decide a long time ago, however, not to have any adverts on SavyGamer. I think it would be hypocritical to impose on users of my website something that I am unwilling to do for other websites. SavyGamer has been ad free for almost forever, and I can categorically state that there are no plans whatsoever to add adverts at any time in the future. Perhaps circumstances will change, but I can’t see how.

Why am I telling you all these things? It’s recently come to my attention that adblockers, depending on how they have been configured, can interfere with Google analytics, and potentially some affiliate services. The impact this has on SavyGamer is that I am missing out on useful (anonymous) data that helps me track which deals are most popular, or just how people are using the site. I tailor the service around this data, so your usage is not being represented here if you have an adblocker that is preventing Google Analytics from working correctly. Secondly, and probably far more importantly for me, if an adblocker is preventing my affiliate stuff from working (where I get a small cut on sales from the retailer for users I direct to purchase from them), I’m missing out on potential earnings. Those earnings are what let me keep working on SavyGamer full time whilst keeping it ad free, and they’re the only source of revenue I get from SavyGamer (aside from the generosity of SavyGamer subscribers), so it is pretty important to me.

I’d like to ask that if you are using an adblocker on your browser, you consider doing me a favour and disabling your adblocker for SavyGamer. There will be zero impact to your experience of using SavyGamer, and it will make my job easier.

Obviously if you consider blocking Google Analytics and affiliate services to be a desirable functionality, then by all means please continue to browse SavyGamer that way. I respect your right to browse the web in whatever way is preferable to you, and you will always be welcome here no matter how your browser is configured. This notice should only be relevant to people that were unaware that adblockers could behave in this way, as I was until just now.

How to disable adblockers for a specific website varies between adblockers, please post in the comments if you have any trouble with it.

Thanks.

TL DR
Please disable your adblocker on SavyGamer if you use one. There are no adverts anyway. Bill Hicks was right.